OREM 4395 – Senior Design Archive

Client: Sabre Airline Solutions
Team: Hunter Ross, Mary Liz Tuttle, Ramon Trespalacios
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Barr   Year: 2014
Documents: Presentation, Report, Video

Sabre Airline Solutions offers data solutions and software to aid airlines sell products, market themselves, and operate efficiently. The company would like to provide traveler segmentation services for their customer reservation system to support various marketing programs. (Segmentation involves classifying prospective buyers into groups, or segments, to create products specifically for each segment.) This project required creating segmentation rules that classify ticket purchase data in this manner.

The senior design team replicated the data to create pre-booking and post-booking results. Pre-booking segmentation will show clusters that do not include variables such as fare and travel time, because these can’t be known until after booking. On the other hand, post‐booking data will provide segments that include purchases made. Pre-booking clusters could be used to make promotions for customers while booking, and post-booking clusters could be used to make promotions after booking.

The team used k-means clustering method and the R software to find the optimal number of clusters in the data and assist Sabre with the design of good fare products. For example, if an airline has created a ticket fare product for a specific market like business‐travelers, the team’s segmentation rules can confirm whether the product is well‐defined and well-targeted.

Client: Frito Lay
Team: Matt Alfano, Brittany Masi
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Barr Year: 2010
Documents: Presentation, Report, Video

The project is to design and create an out-of-stock inventory tool that is user-friendly and able to historically scan data while predicting inventory shortfall at the club/SKU level. More features of this project include determining what Inventory is needed by club/SKU and determine delivery frequency by club. We decided that only these opportunities fell into the scope of our project.

After consolidating all of the available information into one database we removed unnecessary tables to increase the processing speed of analyzing the product “Spy Reports” generated by their current database queries. We analyzed two of the highest-demand product lines that Frito Lay stocks at Sam’s Clubs nationwide. These two products are Smart Mix and Variety Mix. Read more…

Client: Frito Lay
Team: Rodrigo Cantu, Sergio Hueck, Rafael Virzi
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Barr
Year: 2012
Documents: Presentation, Report, Video

Gamesa, a subsidiary of Frito-Lay, is a Mexican Cookie company that sells its product in many different countries, including the United States. Their products, which includes different types of cookies and crackers, are targeted to the Mexican population. The company’s United States sales force consists of 38 representatives in 16 different regions, organized by their different routes to market, location of warehouses, and population density. Today, they dominate the U.s. Hispanic cookie market occupying 50 percent of the market.

The problem we address for Gamesa is: should they should deploy more sales representatives and, if so, where would their optimal locations be? With the current economic recession and the entering of Gamesa’s main competitor, Bimbo, sales have been dropping in the different regions. This resulted in Gamesa asking themselves if they needed a bigger sales force. They also wanted to know what regions could be good to add representatives in the future depending on the migration of the population or the strategy of the competition. Read more…

Team:  Julianna LaFerney, Casey O’Brien
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Siems
Year: 2009
Documents: Final Report (Word), Final Presentation (PPT)

Telecommunications industry is one of the most profitable and rapidly developing industries in the world and it is regarded as an indispensable component of the worldwide utility and services sector.  In recent years, the number of mergers and acquisitions in Telecom Sector has been increasing significantly, and this event study explores mergers and acquisitions in the United States’ telecommunications industry. The study analyzes the history of mergers and acquisitions in the telecommunications industry using market and event study modeling while using the Verizon and Alltel merger as the case study. Read more…

Client: Microtune Inc.
Team: Andrew Bass, Chris Ginder, Shan Zaidi
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Siems
Year: 2009
Documents: Final Report (Word), Final Presentation (PPT)

The problem our team faced was how to account for the financial impact of project delays in product development. Microtune had a product in the market and a new product was under consideration to replace the existing product. The goal was to determine the value of the new product to the firm. In order to generate a cost/benefits analysis for the implementation of a product we developed a series of models in Excel to account for various uncertainties. Read more…

Client:
Team: Emily Moravec, Megan Siems, Christine Van Horn
Faculty advisor:  Dr. Siems  Year: 2009
Documents: Final report (Word), Final presentation (PPT)

Although our client is a world leader in casual dining, the company experienced a decrease in overall customer traffic from one year to the next at one of the specific casual dining brands. As the company invested time and money into marketing campaigns for this restaurant chain throughout the year, they were interested in what caused the overall percent change in customer traffic from the first half of fiscal year 2008 (from now on referred to as 1HF08) to the first half of the fiscal year 2009 (1HF09) to be -3.74%. Read more…

Client: Dallas Police Department
Team:  Kyle E. Kidd, Eric B. Lakey, S. Tyler Nau
Faculty advisor: Dr. Richard Barr Year: 1995
Documents:   Final report

The purpose of this study is to analyze historical data on the Dallas Police Department’s First Offender Programs in order to determine the effectiveness of the programs, and to develop a model to predict the probability of the program being successful for an offender. Using graphing techniques, statistical techniques and operations research techniques the sample was analyzed to reach conclusions about the efficiency of the two programs. Read more…

Client: National Aeronautics and Space  Administration
Team:  Chris Genda, Loan Ngoyen, Valerie Vlahos, John Williams
Faculty advisor: Dr. Richard Barr     Year: 1997
Documents:    Final presentation

The present operations procedures used by the NASA Manufacturing Di­vision has room for improvement in the following areas: information accuracy within the INFISY system and tracking machine downtime, departmental com­munication, job scheduling at each work center, and estimating job cost and completion time. Due to the combined errors and problems mentioned within the Division, several effects are obvious.

The inaccurate use of the INFISY system has led to an incomplete historical data set, which has greatly affected the forecasting of completion times of jobs. This is apparent in the very large negative variances (actual-estimated time). The high percentages of those not logged out on INFISY have led to part mislocation. Job scheduling is diffi­cult without tracking intermediate completion dates. Not monitoring machine down time leads to possible higher repair costs than sometimes purchasing a new machine. Under the current use and application of the INFISY software, job scheduling and forecasting are not optimized as needed. Addressing these issues gradually will improve the production operation. Read more…